It had captured the whole stop from the moment the patrol lights appeared in her mirror: the demand for documents, the refusal to explain the stop, the shove against the car door, the cuffs, all of it, audio and video both.
And her phone — the one the second officer had grabbed and shoved back at her — had already synced the footage to a secure cloud server the instant it registered movement, a habit she’d built into her own devices years ago, back when she’d first started this job and learned exactly how often these situations could turn into he-said-she-said.
None of that would matter to forget. It was already done. It was already saved. It was already, in a sense, evidence.
Victoria climbed back into her car, put both hands on the wheel for a moment, and let herself breathe. Just for a few seconds. Her heart was still going fast, her wrist ached where the cuff had dug in, and underneath the calm she’d kept up the whole time there was something rawer — anger, mostly, and a
